What is the purest way to express the energy of a moment in a painting?  Time and again, I return to pure black and white line paintings for this purpose. A white surface and black paint - either straight from the tube or mixed. Just one tool. No distraction of...

Fog. A form of water that, like snow and rain, can transform our world in a matter of minutes. Whatever the landscape - coast, mountain, dessert - fog can roll in and cover everything that we could see clearly only minutes before. Where are we? Where are we going?...

Absence makes the heart grow fonder. And color has become a special object of affection the last few weeks due to its scarcity. Toronto had its grayest, foggiest December this winter. And so far January is continuing the trend, with the promise that this is likely the...

“Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. “ — Mary Oliver. These are Mary Oliver's instructions for living a life. Simple. Yet profound. Wise advice that I try to enact in my own life. And advice that I like to share with clients. A recent walk around the block...

“Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.” - Desmond Tutu As we head into 2024, there is much we cannot know about what lies ahead. Uncertainty is an integral part of human life. We can be sure, though, that the new year will bring...

“I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.” — Greta Thunberg,  “Our House Is On Fire” speech, World Economic Forum, 2019  A few weeks ago I woke up in the middle of the night with a sense of deep unease....

How curious are you? How are you curious? What does it actually mean to be curious? And why does it matter? Or does it matter? Curiosity is one of those everyday constructs that we often take for granted, without more deeply questioning what it is and how it...

Spring has really arrived in Toronto. This last weekend was a perfect celebration of this arrival. The sun was shining. The sky was blue. It was definitively above freezing. Only very small patches of snow still hide in the deepest shady corners. Snowbells and...

Seeing ourselves and our very brief flash of a life span in the context of deep time is one of those mysteries that truly stretch our ability to make sense of the experience of being a human. What to make of our brief blink of a life in the context of a universe that...

Hope is not optimism. That makes hope dependent on circumstances, something based in the external world. Instead, hope is a discipline, a commitment to keep on investing our time, effort, and energy in the quest to work towards “a better future” – in whatever...

The last few years of Zoom has made us all more aware of our workspaces, and even has us sometimes “fake” the background of the space we are working in. We know there is often an unseen, other side to the spaces we meet in virtually.  My own Zoom background is books –...

I am a book person. And I cannot remember when this has not been true for me. One of my early memories is sitting on the floor in my grandmother’s cool, dark hallway and paging through old books I pulled from a bookshelf. My work has always provided a reason for...